The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Design for Manufacturability (DFM) is an approach for optimizing the design of a product to increase the likelihood that the product may be manufactured without any errors or defects. For example, the design of a product may be adjusted by applying DFM considerations to provide certain margins of error in the design so that if an error does occur during the manufacturing process, the product is still operable.
A trend in circuit design is to design each subsequent generation of a circuit to have smaller dimensions than the prior generation. As the dimensions of a circuit layout become smaller, DFM considerations become more important, as the likelihood of an error or defect being introduced in the manufacturing process increases.
Today, a circuit designer is responsible for implementing DFM considerations in the design of a circuit to account for the practical limitations of the manufacturing process. Typically, a circuit designer follows a set of design rules (the “mandatory design rules”) when designing a circuit layout. For example, the mandatory design rules may be provided by the circuit designer's employer or design team.
In addition to following the mandatory design rules, a designer is free to implement any DFM considerations on a circuit layout in any manner he or she chooses. As a result, different people may choose to apply DFM rules against a circuit layout in different ways. Thus, if the decision to apply DFM rules to a circuit layout is left to the individual circuit designer, DFM rules may be applied inconsistently across circuit layouts, which may result in (a) DFM rules being applied when they need not be applied and/or (b) DFM rules not being applied when they should be applied.